


Violet Hour

by jenny_of_oldstones



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Fluff and Humor, Kadara, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-13 08:57:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13567167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenny_of_oldstones/pseuds/jenny_of_oldstones
Summary: Reyes finds out that Ryder has a surprise planned for him.He has the worst timing.





	Violet Hour

Reyes woke to find Ryder gone.

He swept a hand over the bedsheets. It was pitch dark outside, and the chill in the air told him it was close to dawn.

“Babe?” he said.

The floor was cold under his feet as he stepped into his pajama bottoms. He walked into the apartment’s kitchenette and tugged open the fridge.

“Boo,” said a voice.

Reyes ignored it and pulled out a carton of milk. “Close the door, Ryder.”

Scott sat on the toilet in the bathroom across from the kitchen. He was nude and he rested his head against the sink.

“I was trying not to wake you,” he said. 

Reyes came around the counter. He leaned in the bathroom doorway and took a swig of milk. “Sexy.”

“Hang on, it’s about to get sexier.” There was a plop in the toilet.

Reyes shook his head and went back into the kitchen. He wondered, sometimes, if it was a good sign or a bad sign that he was used to his boyfriend taking a shit in front of him.

“I don’t want to go Pathfinding today,” Scott whined.

“What time are you setting out?”

“0600.”

Reyes made a mental note to have a few agents tail the NOMAD into the badlands. “Still planning on hitting that Remnant site?”

“Yeah.” Scott sounded miserable.

Reyes picked his omnitool off the counter and checked his in-box. There were thirteen messages from within the last hour. He opened the first one and froze.

“What is it?” asked Scott.

Reyes bumped on the kitchen tap. What came out of the faucet was yellow sludge, reeking of rotten eggs. He cursed and turned it off.

“Don’t flush the toilet,” he said,

“Why?”

“We might need the water from the cistern.” He screwed the cap on the milk and slammed it back in the fridge. “The damned filtration system is out for the entire district.”

“Oh. No shower this morning, then?”

“No showers for a week if it’s as bad as they say it is. _Fuck_.”

Reyes thumped back into the bedroom and found his clothes. He was holstering his pistol on his belt when Scott came into the doorway.

“Got any hand sanitizer?” Scott made grabby-fingers at him.

“I’m not in the mood for games.” If there was one situation that could get ugly fast on Kadara, it was a water shortage. There would need to be bottled water distributed and health warnings issued. Someone would have to fly out Varren’s Scalp to find that engineer—

“Reyes.” Scott was still in the doorway.

Reyes shouldered past him into the kitchen and scanned the floor. “Where the hell are my boots?”

“Closet,” said Scott.

Reyes yanked open the closet door. Sure enough, there were his boots, right next to Scott’s.

“Reyes,” said Scott again.

“What?” Reyes shoved his feet into his shoes. Dammit, he’d already sent too many shuttles out on patrol. He’d have to fly out to Varren’s Scalp himself to find....Arvul? Urrel?

“Don’t worry about water today,” said Scott.

“Why, you poison the milk?” Reyes kicked a boot up on the wall and tied the laces.

“I have a good feeling, that’s all.”

Reyes put his foot down and kicked up the other one.

“Just relax,” said Scott.

“ _Relax_?” Reyes stood up. “Do you know what happens on this planet when filters break? People get stupid. They drink dirty water, puke their guts up, and die. And they blow up my omnitool with a ten-thousand complaints a minute. Don’t tell me to relax.”

Scott stared at him. He took a step back and sat bare-assed on one of the kitchen’s metal stools. “Okay. Do the damage control you need to. But don’t stress about fixing the filtration system.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Just trust me.”

“Dammit, you’re going to have to give me more than that.” 

“It’s a surprise.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Reyes.” There was pity in Ryder’s tone now. “This is the Pathfinder talking. I’m not trying to yank you around. Let me be the one to take care of Kadara today.” And then, after a moment, “Please.”

The messenger on Reyes’ omnitool was beeping. There was a part of him—the part that was always exhausted—that wanted to take Ryder at his word. They both kept secrets from each other out of necessity of their roles. There was no reason Scott would lie to him about something like this.

But Kadara was out there. It bore the weight of a thousand problems down on the Charlatan’s shoulders.

Reyes had never liked relying on anyone but himself.

“If you can’t give me a straight answer, then you’re wasting my fucking time.” Reyes didn’t look back. In two strides and he was at the door, yanking it open and slamming it shut. There were already neighbors in the hallway conferring with each other about the water situation. A Collective agent in yellow armor waited for him at the stairwell.

 

* * *

 

 

By the time he was in the air, Reyes had turned off his omnitool’s messenger. His in-box was glutted with complaints, and every few minutes some Collective agent who needed their hand held would call him to ask what the _Charlatan’s_ orders were.

The only people who’d be able to reach him now were Keema and a few trusted officers. The rest would have to wait.

The angaran engineer—Urvel—lived in a prefab alone on Varren’s Scalp. The old man grumbled when Reyes banged on his door at sunrise, but he got into the shuttle once the credits transferred. He sat in the copilot seat and glared out the window, watching the clouds wisp around them.

“Keema will have sent the diagnostics to your omnitool,” said Reyes.

“I don’t know how to use it,” said the angaran. “Show me on yours.”

Reyes engaged the autopilot. He held out his wrist and let Urvel read the damage reports. The old man had designed Kadara Port’s filtration system decades ago, and the way his brow furrowed made Reyes’ stomach churn.

“Not good,” said the angaran. His fingers flipped through the scans. “Oh, not good, not good.”

“Can you tell why it broke?” asked Reyes.

“Age,” said Urvel, drily. “It will need to be replaced.”

“The whole thing?”

The angara hummed. 

“How long will that take?”

“Depends on how fast your boss can get the parts,” said Urvel. “Optimistically, two weeks.”

Reyes pulled his arm back. The hilltop district would have to rely on the rest of the city's filtration, and those systems were overtaxed by the current population as it was. He would need to mobilize his people to transport crisis water stored in Collective caches across the valley to the port. Worse come to worst, he would strong-arm his contacts in the Voeld ice market to make an emergency haul. Either way, this little crisis was going to be a costly headache.  

“You picked a hard planet to invade, alien,” said Urvel.

“Yeah,” said Reyes, disengaging the autopilot. “No shit.”

 

* * *

 

It took six hours for Urvel to inspect the entire filtration system. He took scans, exchanged data with other engineers, and gave Reyes a long list of components to buy.

By then, the old anagara was tiring. He told Reyes he would need to get some tools from his house, and that they would start the hard work tomorrow.

The whole flight back to Varren’s Scalp, Reyes fumed. Keema had sent him an estimate for the replacement parts and a list of potential dealers. Reyes was a relatively wealthy criminal, but even he sensed the corona of a migraine behind his eye at the numbers. It did not help that the dealers were happy to bleed him dry. 

“I take it this won’t be easy on you,” said Urvel.

“To put it lightly,” said Reyes. “Though you must be used to this sort of thing by now. Bad water days are a dime a dozen on Kadara.”

"I don't know what a dime is, but this isn't bad."

“No?”

The old angara gave him a hard look. “When I was a boy, the kett blockaded the planet for over a year. There was a shortage of replacement parts for broken filters, and water wars broke out. Mothers would sell their children for a cupful of creek dreck. Neighbors murdered each other in the dark for wells that dried up in a matter of days. This? This is a hiccup. You don’t know bad.”

"I stand corrected then," said Reyes. "Though, you know, we Milky Wayers haven't exactly been having a vacation here either."

"Aren't you people a prison colony?" 

Reyes was about to answer that, when the sky turned purple.  

It was only years of flight training that kept him from panicking. He checked his instruments and saw that they were all either scrambled or spinning. Altimeter, barometer, wind gauge, every instrument was tumbling as if an electrical current had just passed through it.

“Stars, what is this?” said Urvel.

The shuttle pitched sideways. Every alarm in the cockpit screamed, and Reyes wrestled them upright. Blue light was shooting into the sky from ten o’clock, four o’clock, and six. There was an almighty shudder as if the planet was shaking, and it went on, and on, and on—

And on.

“What in the hell?” The comm channels were clogged with chatter. Reyes leaned to look out of his window.

He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Kadara’s toxic water was usually smoking, iridescent, bubbling with clots of pus-yellow bacteria and noxious clouds of sulfides.

Looking down at the scattered lakes below him, it was like watching a wound heal in time-lapse. The smoke and steam trailed away as if a stove had been turned off. The bacterial pools receded. The iridescent sheen of the water was pushed to the edges and replaced with glassy green and blue. Animals were charging down hills and throwing themselves off cliffs in terror. The ground, Reyes noted with a glance at his instruments, was still rumbling.

“The atmosphere—” said Urvel, “it’s changing.”

“And tectonics,” said Reyes. “Everything is changing.”

Ryder had said he was going to check on a Remnant site that morning. 

Reyes could have slapped himself. The Vault.

The search for it had drawn out for so long that it had started to feel like a running joke. He and Ryder had laughed about it over drinks, even traded intel on Remnant ruins and hotspots around the valley from time to time. None of it ever amounted to anything. Scott rode around in his rover, shot robots, did puzzles, and came no closer to uncovering the secret heart of Kadara. Over time, the idea that the miracle that had saved Eos might happen here had become a remote fantasy—one that took a backseat to the day-to-day management of the port. Reyes had put it out of his head and forgotten. 

Surprise. The little shit.

There were so many alarms going off that it took Reyes a few minutes to realize that his omnitool was pinging.

“Reyes.” Keema sounded peeved. “The ground is shaking”

“I noticed. Everything all right down there?”

“Other than everyone screaming in the streets like it’s the end of the world. Are you in the air?”

“Over Draullir right now.”

“I’m worried about our people in the caverns. All this shifting could lead to cave-ins.”

“Nothing we can do about it now,” said Reyes. “I think Ryder caused this.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.” There was a crash in the background. “If he is responsible, he owes me a new set of wine glasses.”

“If this is anything like what happened on Eos, then it could mean...”

“No more scrounging for filtration parts. That’ll be a first.”

Reyes' mind raced ahead. Clean water, healthy soil—they could farm. Kadara wouldn’t have to scavenge anymore, she could thrive. No more water markets. No more people knifing each other over fertilizer.

Kadara could be home.

“I’ll talk to you later, Keema,” he said. “When this is over, get a head count on our people and have them do a survey of our sites.”

“Assuming it does stop,” she said, and cut the line.

Reyes sent the Pathfinder a message and got a response almost at once: "Meet me here," along with a set of navpoints. Reyes turned the shuttle north and followed them.

 

* * *

 

 

It wasn’t ten minutes before Reyes got a visual on the NOMAD. The rover was bouncing down a ravine, vaulting off hills and cliffs with careless speed. It skidded to a halt when Reyes put his shuttle down.

The ground had stopped rumbling by the time Reyes got out. Ryder exited the NOMAD and wove across the grass to him as if it hadn’t. An asari and a turian got out behind him, the asari throwing back a giant bottle of champagne.

“Reyes!” Ryder dragged him into a hug.

“Are you drunk?” said Reyes.

“Don’t tell anyone—I don’t want a DUI on my record.” Ryder giggled.

“You must be Vidal,” said the turian. “Vetra, Vetra Nyx. This is Peebee.”

“Heeeey.” Peebee offered him the bottle, then changed her mind and took another swig.

“I suppose I have you to thank for the massive earthquake just now,” said Reyes.

“Yup,” said Peebee, at the same time Vetra said, “was anyone hurt?”

“I was on my way back to port, so I couldn’t say. Still, changing a planet’s entire ecology in a single afternoon probably caused _some_ problems.”  

“We almost died," said Ryder. "At least fifty times."

"Killer cloud," said Peebee. "You know how it is."

The awkward silence that followed gave Reyes a chance to take in the state of the group in front of him. Ryder and the two women reeked of smoke and sweat. Their armor bore the telltale scars from Remnant lasers, and there were patches of blue medigel congealed on their skin. They looked, and smelled, like they'd tangled with an army of pissed-off robots.

He hadn't been the only one having a stressful morning.

"A killer...cloud?" said Reyes.     

"Same bullshit that almost murdered us on Eos," said Ryder. "An ancient purification field that eats organic matter."

"We ran away from it," said Peebee. "Screaming."

“I could spare you the gory details by saying all this is classified,” said Vetra to Reyes, out of what he suspected was pity. “But I get the feeling you'd hear it all from Scott anyway.”

“You’d be surprised the things we don't tell each other,” said Reyes.

“Somehow, I know how you feel,” said Vetra.

The passenger door of the shuttle popped open. Urvel lowered himself carefully to the ground. The old angaran squinted at the sun, then shuffled down to the hill to a little stream of water.

“Who’s your friend?” asked Vetra.

“One of my contractors,” said Reyes.

Urvel went shakily to his knees. He dipped his hands into the stream and raised them to his lips. He drank deeply, swished the water around his teeth, and spat it on the ground.

“You all right?” called Reyes. He pushed Ryder off and walked down to the stream’s edge.

“The water,” said Urvel. “It’s clean.”

“Cleaner,” said Peebee. "I still wouldn't recommend doing that."

The old angara struggled to his feet. To Reyes’ astonishment, there were tears in his eyes. “You did this?”

“Ryder and SAM did,” said Vetra. “We just helped.”

The old angara took two steps and threw himself on Ryder in an embrace.

They stood there uncomfortably while the old man whimpered. Scott, still drunk, rubbed circles on his back.

“You don’t know,” said Urvel, over and over. “You don’t know.”

It was then that Reyes noticed that the air was different. The pungent sulfur that clung to the surface of Kadara was fainter. For the first time, he could smell the grass, the dew, and the clean babbling brook.

No, thought Reyes. We really don’t know.

“Let’s get you home,” said Reyes and touched Urvel’s shoulder. He said to Ryder, “And let’s get you somewhere you can sober up. I don’t like being out in the open like this.”

"I want to go back to your place," said Ryder.

Reyes glanced at Vetra, who shrugged. "Peebee and I can drive back to port. He wouldn't be much help in a firefight anyway. Plus, he's earned a rest."

Reyes nodded and steered the old man back to his shuttle. Scott, who had the champagne bottle now, crawled into the cargo hold. 

The bottle was empty by the time they got home.    

 

* * *

 

 

Reyes all but carried Ryder into his apartment. He shouldered him inside and dropped him on the bed.

“Reyes,” said Scott. “I fixed Kadara.”

Reyes set his pistol on the counter and turned the sink on. It sputtered yellow gunk for a minute, then poured out clean, cold water. He scanned it with his omnitool.

“The water will still need filtering,” he said. “But we can boil it until we get the system back up.”

“And we can flush the toilet.” Scott saluted the ceiling with the bottle.

Reyes went in the bathroom and hit the toilet handle. He flicked on the small fan in the ceiling and shut the door.

“I told you not to worry about the water today,” said Ryder.

Reyes sat down on the end of the bed and began typing messages. Public health bulletins. Blast emails to the district. Their bottled water supplies would need to be restocked.

The sun was setting over the port now. The light slanted in tiger stripes through the blinds, crawling slowly up the wall. Reyes sent the last update to Keema and closed his in-box. He ran a gloved hand through his hair.

“You fixed Kadara,” said Reyes.

“I fixed Kadara.”

“You fixed.” Reyes rubbed his face. “Kadara.”

“Joke’s on you.” The mattress creaked as Ryder sat up and hooked his arms and legs around him. “I’m the king now.”

Ryder bumped the bottle against Reyes’ lips. Reyes grabbed it and put in on the floor. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” said Ryder.

“It would have killed you to say, ‘I’m going after the Vault?’”

“It was a surprise.”

“Five words.”

“It was a _surprise_. Would it have changed anything if I told you?”

Reyes wasn’t sure what he would have done if he’d known a Vault was in the equation. Probably he have gotten in the way of the Pathfinder’s duties, or at least tried to ground Ryder so they could talk things out more.

He would not have trusted Ryder to put things right.

Reyes rolled them onto their sides.

"Thank you," he said.

"Reyes?"

"I should have trusted your expertise. In the future, I'll try better to take you at your word, so long as you promise not to play games like a child."

The orange sky faded to black. The neon lights of the nightclubs came to life, and a few doors down, loud music was playing. A man and woman in the alley below sang together off-key, until the woman's heels clicked away down the street.

"It was supposed to be this big romantic gesture," said Ryder. His lips were warm against the back of Reyes' neck. “I wanted to give you the planet you signed up for when you joined the Initiative. I thought if you saw the Vault fix Kadara, tomorrow you'd start to feel hopeful, at least for a little while. I didn't mean to stress you out today. I'm sorry."  

Reyes squeezed the arms wrapped around him. There was something painful inside his chest, an emotion he wasn't able to grapple with.

Kadara was new now. Someone had given that to him.

It had come without price, even though he had done little to deserve it.

He wanted to say, _this is a little terrifying_ , or, _I don't think I can ever trust you the way you trust me_.

Instead, he said, "You made that old angara cry. If you keep pulling this shit, people are going to build a cult around you.”  

“These hands,” said Ryder, and smooshed Reyes' face between them. “Are healing hands.”

"You're terrible,” said Reyes.

“I know,” said Ryder. “We good?”

Reyes laughed. “Not quite. You’re still going to clean my toilet tomorrow.”     


End file.
